news | Wednesday April 9, 2025

It's Arab American Heritage Month!

April is Arab American Heritage Month! To mark the occasion, we want to recommend some recent titles to enrich your to-be-read pile.

Revolutions by Hajer Mirwali arrives this month! Mirwali’s debut book sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities. Working between a Palestinian and Iraqi poetics drawing from artists like Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma and a feminist Canadian poetics inspired by Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Nicole Brossard, Revolutions spirals and collapses as we turn and re-turn around its circles.

An excerpt from “Meeting + and –: January 18th”:

“On the plane Mama asks if xxxxxxx has a
boyfriend. We are two women talking about
a girl we are worried for. We eat the halal
meal. We scroll past a photo on Instagram
think how ugly that girl’s shoes are. We sleep on our shoulder. We feel our warmth
doubling. We forget our obligation to split.”

Pre-order your copy of Revolutions here.

Released in February of 2024, Speaking Through the Night: Diary of a Lockdown March–April 2020 by Wajdi Mouawad and translated by Linda Gaboriau is a glorious demonstration of Mouawad’s unparalleled ability to turn a phrase. While isolating in the early days of the pandemic, Mouawad embarks upon a spectacular inner voyage, travelling from his own microcosm to the eye of the Big Bang. We follow him from Peter Handke’s office to his father’s retirement home, from the banks of the Saint Lawrence to Montréal, Greece, Greenland, and the Lebanon of his childhood. Through Kafka and Star Wars, by way of French phonetics and the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, he explores the razor’s edge of madness, conjures a dream shared by all humanity, and probes the bestiality of our everyday lives.

An excerpt from Speaking through the Night:

‘My father, like so many others, doesn’t fear confinement as much as he fears solitude at the moment of his death. War, it’s true, had accustomed my father to solitude. For years on end, having stayed in Lebanon to continue working while we were in Paris, then in Montréal, he had to learn to cope with unhappiness. For years, much later when I would stop by to visit him, I often asked him about those terrible years. He always avoided the question, finding clever ways to change the subject and bring me back to the question of money, his favourite subject. But as the years went by, with the onset of old age, illness, and the prospect of death, his heart opened and he began to speak more openly, freed from the sclerosis of shame that had restrained him for such a long time. “How did you manage on your own during the war, Papa? When the bombing was so intense, not only was it impossible to leave the house but it was impossible to communicate with us or with anyone? Internet didn’t exist, cellphones didn’t exist, and the phone lines were always down. So what did you do?…” I think I asked him that question every Sunday for ten years. And one day, instead of dismissing the question with his usual answer, “I don’t know. What do you expect me to say?! That’s how it was, there was no way around it. What do you think we could do? I don’t know. How can you expect me to remember? Stop asking me these questions, yallah khalas!”…One day, instead, he started to laugh and he said: “You won’t believe it, but I’ll tell you anyway, and you can use it for one of your plays and you’ll stop thinking your father’s an idiot and it will be a great comedy.”’

Pick up your copy of Speaking through the Night here.

Happy Arab American Heritage Month! As ever, we wish you great reading.